Unlocking Our Domestic Lng Potential Act of 2024

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCALISE. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from South Carolina for yielding. I know my friend is not leaving any time soon, but we have appreciated both our friendship and leadership along the way, and we will miss him when he is gone. There is a lot of work left to be done in these next few months.

Mr. Speaker, there is a lot of work left to be done today if you think about the importance of this bill.

It really focuses on the importance of smart energy policy, something that has been lacking--devastatingly lacking--in this country for the last 3 years, and it is a costly, costly consequence that American families are paying. Having bad energy policy has resulted in higher energy costs for families.

Mr. Speaker, especially low-income families are hit the hardest. When you see gas prices go higher, it hits lower-income families the hardest. When you see the home heating costs because of that LNG policy, it affects everybody. It affects prices and commodities, things that you buy at the grocery store, because all of that is built in when you have higher energy costs. It especially affects low-income families when they have to decide can they even pay their home heating costs in a cold winter.

All these decisions are being made because Joe Biden has gone after American energy. Joe Biden is not against all forms of energy.

Let's be clear about this.

What has this President done in his entire Presidency over the last 3 years?

Time and time again, Joe Biden goes after American energy. When he says it is harder to drill for oil in America, it is because he attacks the fossil fuel industry. He doesn't ban all oil. He just makes it harder to get permits in America. So what that does is it emboldens countries like Russia, Venezuela, and Iran, who are selling their oil on world markets and making billions and billions of dollars doing it. In fact, it helps them fund terrorist activities.

When you think of Iran having more power because the President lifts sanctions on them, and then the President goes after domestic American oil and gas, then he emboldens countries like Iran which then makes billions of dollars that they use to fund terrorism; there is a direct link. We all know that.

Yet, here the other side goes with the President, once again, going after not all forms of energy and not all forms of LNG, just American- made LNG by banning LNG exports in America.

So think about this, Mr. Speaker, there used to be a day when we encouraged companies to make their products in America. We heard a lot of people making speeches about buy American and make it in America. Nevertheless, if you say make it in America, but you can make it anywhere in the world--these are global commodities we are talking about--but if you make it in America, we are going to ban you from selling it anywhere in the world.

So, Mr. Speaker, if you make it somewhere else, if you make it in Iran, you can sell it anywhere on world markets. If you make it in America, then they are going to ban you from selling your product.

So what it does is it has a stifling effect on production and exploration of energy in America--not anywhere else in the world--just in America.

For all my friends who love talking about the climate, nobody in the world makes energy cleaner and more efficient than the United States of America.

I am sick and tired of these people who wake up every day and love bashing America, bashing American companies, and bashing American products or American fossil fuels, as if we got rid of them then they just don't exist.

All that happens is that if we get rid of American energy, then we have to get it from other countries and we have to bring it here on tankers, which, by the way, have a much higher rate of failure than if we put it in a pipeline, which is much safer, or other means.

The policies that we are seeing out of this administration to go after American energy is lunacy, and it is costing families who are sick and tired of paying higher energy costs when they know they don't have to.

This is not the 1970s anymore where we had lines at the pump, and we could only get gasoline every other day based on the license plate number because we didn't have the technology to know where more energy was in America.

We have got all that today. We know what that technology is, and we know where the energy reserves of this country are. We could provide all the energy for our country and all of our allies around the world.

By the way, we lowered emissions when we did that.

Interestingly, they don't have any of this apply to countries like China that are building a coal plant every week with emissions through the roof. We do it cleaner and better than anywhere else in the world, and we should have policies that allow us to do even more production of American energy.

That is what this bill does. That is not what the President does. President Biden over and over again has attacked and gone after American energy, and people are sick and tired of it because they know nobody does it better.

They are sick and tired of having to see countries like Russia benefit, Iran's economy benefit, and other countries benefit when it should be our economy that benefits.

Mr. Speaker, I urge adoption of this legislation. Let's pass it on. I commend Representative Pfluger for bringing this to the floor, and I hope that we actually get the policy right. This bill helps us do that.

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